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User blog:Darkaxel1989/Best food production caravan
Assuming you don't travel with a camel caravan (with a speed of 6, it's quite slow, even if the whole Metal wagon/Large carts does make a difference in the profit you can make!) or an all horse caravan (which is faster, but more forage and water dependent than one could like or afford, with the limited cargo capacity of horses), one has to make a choice: Buy food, or produce it with animals? We're not here to answer this question though, but to answer the next question, if you choose to produce. That question is: which animal is the best food producer? Camels and Horses are the most inefficient, and rightly so, considering the speed and load they have! Anyway, the horse is. the camel produces, on average, more kcal than a goat, and with just a little more water and forage consumption (from here only called "consumption") than the latter. But what is this "Best production" we're talking about (or NOT talking, because we didn't even start talking about it, right?)? Is it most kcal related to consumption, to weight, or to passenger space required, or a combination of the four? First, let's see how much each animal produces (according the wiki's average in the animal section): That means, surprise! Cows produce the most kcal per day. Duh! But that's not where we stop. Let's start considering consuption. Let's assume that water costs 0.5 per liter (which is a little overestimated) and forage 1.5 per k (which is also overestimated, if one doesn't consider the few places where it costs something like 17/20...). let's go with another table. we love tables, right? This shows that sheeps are the best producers, when considering how much it costs keeping them alive, and cows are the second best. Plus, let's remember that sheeps produce wool! Of course cows could carry their own food, but do you really want to travel to a measly 3 km/h? The second thing we're going to consider is their weight. You're probably going to bring those animals in some kind of cart or car, right? No one wants to travel at 4 or 5 km/h. unless in tribal regin, when you start the game and need some pack mules! So let's see the kcal per weight (no more table) : Sheep: 2,98; Goat 1,2; Cow 0,79 The other animals are reasonably fast, so one usually doesn't carry them in a cart or car, plus they're not exacly good producers, as we already saw, right? Anyway, they're sensibly worst than the other three animals. Anyway, the best one to carry around appears to be the sheep, doesn't it? But there's a catch, and not a little one at that. Let's see it in the next step! This information is, sadly, not included in any page of the wiki, but one can see in the game that goats will rarely require more than 3 passenger space, while sheeps will more often than not, require 4 spaces. That means, regardless from weight, the only transportation means able to carry sheeps around are camels with metal wagons and Umi Alphas. Now, if you ever wanted to buy sheeps to produce good amounts of food for you, that means you DON'T travel in a camel caravan. One camel can almost completely feed a human. almost. in a caravan with, let's say, 100 people (which is ridiculous, who goes around with that many mercenaries or slaves, or prisoners?) one could require between 120 and 150 female camels. I didn't really do the math on the camels yet, and I really don't plan to. Who cares? You have the camels, or you don't. They breed. Each camel added to the caravan is beneficial to your business, EVEN IF they were all males, because they can haul serious amounts of cargo, and thus money. Not that that extra milk was a bad thing to produce! The arguing between Horse vs Camels has been there for a while and, even if I prefer horses because they're faster and I like to chase bandits, camels are probably better than horses in every aspect regarding food, and business. After this not so little digression from the main thing, let's go back to the sheeps and goats. Sheeps produce more, goats can be transported in a large cart (which requires horses, and really strong ones at that). The only way to transport sheeps, beside the camels (and that is where that monstruosity of an excursus about camels started...) are the 5 or 6 Umi Alphas. A sheep can ''almost ''feed a man on his own. And ''almost ''supply him with the water he needs. for every person in a caravan it should be enough to have 1.2 or 1.3 sheeps (not cutted to pieces though!) and that means, with a whooping 6x32=192 places in your Umis, one could potentially have a self sufficent (foodwise) caravan of more or less (probably more) 30 people (30 people take 30 places and 40 sheeps would take 160 places). And there would be plenty of cargo space for the business. One could even let the people walk, if they're not too slow, because fuel is used up per km and not per day! That doesn't really help with the max load though, so it's not really advisable in my opinion. What would that number of 30 people be, if we were to take cows? Cows take up 5-7 spaces. So let's work with an average of 6. That number would grow to more or less 37 (probably more), along with the cost of forage and water, which could be neglected, since one assumes you already have your good strategy to make lots of money by the end of the game! So the Cows are really the best choice to, let's say, be a bounty hunter (just keep in mind that the suckers you imprison will require space too, unless you're ready to travel at 8 km/h or less), but sheeps are by far the better choice to make a small caravan of only 5 or six people and you plan to escape all bandits while hauling big amounts of goods from a place to the other! If space is not a problem, than sheeps are the best choice, both consumption-wise and weight-wise!! The only good point of goats is that their cheese is the best sold, is the second best tasting food and has more kcal than any other food of the game. But for that one needs an industry, and money, and visiting a town only for that one reason... And the idiot right here, who just wrote this whole bunch of tables and other stuff, kept using goats to the very end in all his games! What a moron I was :D What do you guys think? Is there some other reason to choose cows over sheeps or the other way around? Or maybe is there a reason to keep using goats? Category:Blog posts